curated: no, it’s not “ignorant” to ask where the women and the people of color are in ‘Dunkirk‘

Thank you for this, MaryAnn!
One of the things that ticked me off in the Now Playing podcast episode on the first Captain America film was when they were complaining how “P.C.” it was with having Peggy Carter, Gabe Jones, and Jim Morita in the WWII flick, not recognizing that, yes, women were in the military, both in the UK and in the US, and that, yes, black men and Japanese men were participating in the European theater (as drivers in the first case and as members of the war’s most highly decorated combat team in the second).

What you do mean, “why doing what”? The little ships that come to rescue the soldiers are civilian ships. Women sail on their own ships all the time. (Some of these ships were taken over by naval sailors, but not all. Some were operated by their owners, and in fact we see Rylance’s character deliberate set off early in order to avoid having his yacht requisitioned.) We *see* one of these women in the movie, the woman handing out tea to cold soldiers *on her private boat*; Branagh’s character yells to her to ask where she’s from (she says Dorset). She could have been a bigger character.

Anna

Oh cool I didn’t know that I thought they were all warships (haven’t seen movie)

LA Julian

Mrs Miniver got awards & legendary status BECAUSE it was the Battle of Britain and Dunkirk from an ‘ordinary’ housewife’s perspective, trying to keep her family going.

It was also made DURING the war. We slip backwards, it seems.

Tonio Kruger

It also produced a sequel that no one likes to remember because it allegedly trashed all the beloved characters from the first movie. Apparently that has become a tradition in Hollywood…

Beowulf

We leave out a lot of history in our films: 25% of the cowboys in the old West were black people. And there were lots of Mexican cowpokes in the Southwest, too.

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